University founder visits Trinity

Former student Chin Kyung Kim (centre), founder of universities in China and North Korea, on a recent visit to us with our Korean faculty and students

20 June 2011

At the end of term we were delighted to welcome to Trinity a former student who has started universities in China and North Korea.

Chin Kyung Kim (known as James Kim in his student days at Clifton Theological College in the 1960s) felt a call when he was 15 to serve God in the communist world. Over 40 years later he was able to use his success in business to found Yanbian College of Science and Technology (YUST) in China. He was then invited to found a similar institution in North Korea, which opened last year: Pyonyang University of Science and Technology (PUST). Both these universities are staffed by Christians and have an underlying spirit which is ‘unabashedly Christian' in Chin Kyung Kim's words.

While at Trinity (which took over the site of Clifton Theological College in the 1970s) Chin-Kyung Kim met faculty and students and visited his old room. A bedroom in Henry Martyn House, our Centre for World Christianity, was named in his honour.

Read about Chin Kyung Kim and PUST in an article in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/26/world/asia/26pyongyang.html

Also see on YUST http://www.yust.edu/yust2000/eng/index.html and on PUST http://pust.kr